Fábio had left Asunción in June, with the medical corps, for the cordillera campaign. Renata had remained at the barrack hospital, and Fábio was thankful she was spared the horrors of this final thrust against the enemy — for that it would bring an end to the war, he had no doubt.
In the operating tent, the Guarani boy, sedated with ether, lay naked on the table. Fábio and his helpers staunched the flow of blood where the boy’s foot had been severed; the other leg was amputated below the knee.
The boy died while they were stitching the flaps on the stump.
Late afternoon at the plain of Acosta Ñu, the Paraguayan lines were collapsing. For nine hours they had withstood the onslaughts, but on every quarter now, gun positions were overrun; trenches were stormed and taken. Hundreds of prisoners were being driven back behind the Brazilian lines.
“C’est magnifique!” said the comte d’Eu at his headquarters near Clóvis da Silva’s battery. “Ce moment de la victoire!”
The homely Prince Louis Gaston had proved himself a veritable tiger in battle, galloping fearlessly from one position to another exhorting his troops to fight. And now, as the overcast sky darkened, the moment of victory was almost at hand.
There was a wood just south of the plain. In the fading light, and viewed from a distance such as lay between the comte’s headquarters and the forest, tiny black dots could be seen emerging from out of the trees, scuttling through the macega toward the Paraguayan lines; they looked like so many squads of small, dark peccaries bolting through the grass. And like wild pigs, they provided excellent sport for cavalrymen who rode them down, sticking them with their lances.
Those tiny figures dashing across the macega were the mothers of boys in the trenches. They had hidden in the woods all day watching the progress of battle and were running to see if their children were dead or alive.
Stubborn Guarani still held patches of macega. So the grass was set on fire. It burned furiously, the flames consuming the wounded who lay there and driving their comrades out into the waiting lines of Brazilian steel.
The battle of Acosta Ñu was over. But once again Francisco Solano López had escaped his pursuers. As night fell, Brazilian scouts rode in to report López and the remnant of his army — a vanguard of two thousand, at most — miles away, moving to the north.
The 4,300 Paraguayans holding the plain at Acosta Ñu all day long had bought precious time for López — at the cost of two thousand lives. Of these, eighteen hundred were boys, and there were children of six and seven here, lying beside flintlock muzzle-loaders.
That night, Antônio Paciência and Henrique Inglez were sitting on the parapet of an earthworks; Tipoana was down in the trench, inspecting the crowded dead with a lantern. Behind them at numerous fires, their comrades were rejoicing.
“Ai, caramba! Meninos . . . meninos . . . meninos!” Tipoana complained. Boys! Just boys! No commanders-in-chief with gold crosses and silver spurs; no select pickings for Urubu, king of corpse robbers! He prowled down there all the same, rolling over small, mutilated bodies, poking into pockets, exclaiming hopefully when he came to an old man who had come to battle in a shabby frock coat. But the veteran’s pockets offered nothing of value to Tipoana.
“You’re wasting your time,” Henrique Inglez said. “The bones of Paraguay are picked clean!” He turned to Antônio: “What more does he want?”
They all had their share, Antônio knew. He himself owned a pouch of gold and silver coins.
Urubu came back along the trench. “Meninos!” he whined. “Not one peso among the lot of them!” There was a boy at his feet. Urubu bent down to pluck something from the corpse. Chuckling malevolently, he straightened up, holding the object in the light of his lantern.
Henrique Inglez’s long, narrow face contorted with rage, his buckteeth bared. “Savage!” he shouted at Tipoana. “Heartless savage! Dead, brave boys! They deserve respect!”
“Let it be, Tipoana,” Antônio Paciência said. “They fought and died like men, did they not?”
The object Tipoana dangled in the lantern light was a crudely fashioned false beard. Every boy in this trench had strapped one of these to his jaw hoping to make the macacos think he was a man.
Francisco Solano López eluded his pursuers for six months. Deeper and deeper he fled into the wilderness, through swamps and jungles where no man before had tread, leaving in his wake the bodies of his followers dead from starvation and victims, too, of final purges of suspected traitors. On March 1, 1870, El Presidente, who had been declared an outlaw by a provisional government at Asunción, was at Cerro Corá, “The Corral,” a deep, wooded basin surrounded by hills, 230 miles northeast of Asunción. With him were five hundred emaciated men and boys, the last warriors of Paraguay.
And here, too, in this wild and lonely amphitheater ringed by hills, was Eliza Alicia Lynch: Through the roar of guns at Humaitá, the retreat in the miasmal Chaco, the defeat at Itá-Ybate, the last days at Piribebuy, through it all, Eliza Alicia Lynch had stood by the man she loved. She was here at Cerro Corá, hoping against hope, with her five sons from Francisco beside her.
The Brazilians attacked at 7:00 A.M. They sent a cavalry regiment to punch a hole in the ring of hills; outside The Corral, they had eight thousand soldiers waiting.
“For the love of Christ, Eliza! Go! Go!” El Presidente ordered. “Take our boys! Go!”
Eliza rode off in a carriage with four of her sons. The fifth led her escort: fifteen-year-old Colonel Juan Francisco López.
The Brazilian cavalry swept away the guard post in the hills and poured into the basin. One hundred horsemen crashed through the undergrowth toward Madame Lynch and her sons.
“Halt! Halt!”
The driver of the carriage reined in the jaded animals hauling the vehicle.
“Surrender!”
“Never!” Colonel Juan Francisco López raised his revolver and fired a shot. An instant later a lance driven into his chest mortally wounded him.
The battle at the camp of Cerro Corá raged fifteen minutes. The Brazilians went to work with carbine, saber, and lance, shooting and cutting their way through the ragged lines of four hundred defenders. The enemy drew ever closer to El Presidente on his white steed in the heart of the camp.
A lancer spurred his charger’s flanks, and with an iron grip on the shaft of his lance, stormed toward Francisco Solano López. His long blade slashed El Presidente’s abdomen, but López stayed on his horse as his assailant burst past him. Several of his staff saw what happened and closed in protectively. With the lines of defenders smashed, this small group made a run for it with their chief, cutting their way through the Brazilians and fleeing into the forest. They got as far as the steep-banked Aquidaban-Niqüí, a mile or two north of the camp.
López was bleeding profusely. His horse splashed through the shallow stream. López could not make it up the high bank. Some of his staff helped him off his horse; some sped in search of an easier crossing.
Brazilians who had given chase found the marshal president there, sitting in the mud next to a small palm.
“Surrender!”
He said nothing. With what strength he had left, he flung his sword at the group of macacos.
A Brazilian stepped forward and shot him at point-blank range.
Francisco Solano López then spoke his last words: “¡Muero con mi patria!” (“I die with my country!”)
There never was a truer epitaph.
In five years of war, ninety percent of the men and boys of Paraguay were slain. Paraguay, the land of the Guarani, was dead.
At Rio de Janeiro, they counted the cost of the greatest war between nations in the Americas.
The Allies lost 190,000 men, the majority of them Brazilians.
Even so, at Rio de Janeiro, it was the hour of triumph for Pedro de Alcantara, emperor of Brazil. Like his ancestors who had sent their soldados from Lisbon to smite the Infidels in India and subject the savages in Africa and Brazil in the glorious age of As Conqu
istas, Dom Pedro Segundo had made his conquest.
THE ILLUSTRATED GUIDE TO BRAZIL - SONS OF THE EMPIRE
BOOK SIX: The Brazilians
XX
November 1884 - November 1889
At Recife on a Sunday afternoon in November 1884, a crowd filled the Teatro Santa Isabel and overflowed onto the Campo das Princesas in the city center; those unable to get into the building surged toward its open windows hoping to catch a glimpse of Joaquim Aurélio Nabuco, lawyer and journalist, the man of the hour in Brazil.
“Handsome Jack,” his friends called him. He was well over six feet tall. His dark, wavy hair was parted in the center, his mustache luxurious.
Nabuco was nearing the end of a hard-fought battle for election as national deputy in the First District of Recife. He represented the Liberal party against Dr. Manoel Machado Portela, the Conservative candidate, a law professor and veteran politician. The elections had been called after a vote of no confidence toppled a Liberal cabinet that had proposed the liberation of slaves sixty and older. Until this open support for abolition, the two major parties had spoken as one on matters of concern to the rural elite, who were still the power brokers of Brazil. A third political party, the Republicans, had published a manifesto in 1870, advocating the abolition of the monarchy, but had yet to win a seat in the national chamber.
One hundred and twenty thousand were eligible to vote in the coming elections, little more than one percent of the free population of the empire.
Joaquim Nabuco’s credentials for office were impeccable. He came from two of the oldest and most distinguished families of the Northeast: His father, Senator José Thomaz Nabuco de Araujo, had been the third generation of Nabucos to serve in the imperial parliament; his mother, Dona Anna Benigna de Sá Barreto, belonged to a family descended from João Paes Barreto, who had settled in Pernambuco in 1557 and founded at Cabo one of the great plantation dynasties.
After his schooling at the Corte, Joaquim Nabuco had attended law school at São Paulo during the time the empire was at war with Paraguay.
He shared those years with a group of idealistic young men, among them Antônio de Castro Alves, a poet who, like the bards of Vila Rica in the eighteenth century, had made “liberty” a watchword.
In 1876, Nabuco accepted a post at the Brazilian legation in New York. He spent eighteen months in the United States before he was transferred to London. In 1878, his father’s death brought him back to Brazil. That same year, at the age of twenty-nine, he took his seat in the imperial parliament as a deputy from Rio de Janeiro.
At the Corte, the young Nabuco had lost no time attacking slavery in the Chamber and at public meetings, but the supporters of abolition were still few and the tropical capital itself was trapped between two worlds and deeply rooted in the past. On the eve of the 1880s, Rio de Janeiro had 450,000 inhabitants. Its imperial nobles lived in garden suburbs below Corcovado Mountain, where some of their palatial homes were far grander than the imperial palace at São Cristovão. The majority of the Corte’s citizens inhabited the bleak regions of the city, like Swine’s Head, where thousands were crowded together, many of them veterans of the Paraguayan War. But the war had also given impetus to industry: Factories rose beside ancient convents, and telegraph lines and railroads extended for hundreds of miles into the interior.
Just as in the past Recife and the Bahia had been the nuclei for the great sugar regions, the Corte was the commercial center for Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Minas Gerais, which produced more than half the world’s coffee. The three wealthiest provinces of the empire were also the greatest slaveholding areas, with more than two-thirds of Brazil’s 1,500,000 slaves.
Some fazendeiros had again raised the possibility of importing Asians to work in the groves, but the call for “coolies” drew little support. And there had been new attempts to attract peasant laborers from Portugal, Spain, and Italy, but the number of new settlers was still insignificant. In the “Black Triangle,” as men like Nabuco referred to the three coffee provinces, the great harvests of red berries continued to depend on slave labor.
Nabuco had introduced a bill in the Chamber in 1880 calling for an end to slavery by 1890, but it had been defeated. That same year, he had joined others in launching the Brazilian Antislavery Society, of which he was the first president. Despite their ceaseless propaganda for abolition, the movement was at a nadir in 1881, when Nabuco and other pro-abolition deputies lost their seats in the Chamber.
One of the most serious obstacles to the cause of total abolition was a law passed in 1871 — the Free-Womb law, which offered conditional liberty to slave children born after September 27, 1871. The ingênuos (“innocents”) were to be supported by their mother’s owner until the age of eight, at which time they could be released for an indemnity paid by the government or apprenticed to the slave owner until their twenty-first birthday. Obviously, the majority of owners preferred to keep the ingênuos as laborers until they turned twenty-one, and by 1884 only 118 of an estimated 400,000 ingênuos had been freed.
The “free-womb” law had silenced all but a few vociferous abolitionists. Dom Pedro himself had maintained a dignified calm. His Majesty’s instincts were against slavery and he was sensitive to petitions for abolition, but since the landowners and slaveocrats opposed to abolition were the strongest supporters of the monarchy, he exercised utmost caution.
Despite these obstacles, the abolitionists scored their first triumph in the northern province of Ceará in March 1884. The Northeast had been devastated by one of the periodic droughts that scourged the interior. Ceará had been worst hit: More than one-third of its population — 300,000 people — were dead from starvation and disease.
Before the drought, there had been thirty thousand slaves in Ceará. Many perished, but several thousand were sold to slave traders from the south. Then in 1881 the coffee provinces had placed high taxes on slave imports. The fazendeiros were afraid that depletion of slaveholdings in the north would foster a climate of abolitionism that could spread to the south. But they acted too late. When traders took a group of slaves down to the beach at Fortaleza, the capital of Ceará, the ferrymen refused to carry the slaves to ships waiting to take them south. The boatmen’s strike spurred a wave of abolition sentiment. On March 24, 1884, Ceará declared itself free of slavery.
In the Teatro Santa Isabel at Recife this Sunday afternoon in November, Joaquim Nabuco was inveighing against the foes of abolition:
“Our opponents tell the world that because the womb of the slave is free, slavery is extinct in Brazil. That law is a sham that serves the interests of the slaveocrats and will prolong Brazil’s humiliation. Consider the female slave born on September twenty-seventh, 1871, the day before the law came into effect: Her mother’s womb was not free, so she remains a slave, who at the age of forty, 1911, may bear a child. Now, if this ingênuo’s master refuses the indemnity, the ingênuo can be kept in provisional slavery until the age of twenty-one — 1932. Seventy years after Abraham Lincoln’s proclamation, Brazil will have a generation languishing in the senzalas!
“Abolition will ruin and bankrupt Brazil, the slaveocrats cry. Our adversaries in the Black Triangle, where a million slaves are held, propose an alternative: Asiatic emigration. My friends, that would be a fatal error. It would bring millions of yellow slaves to mingle in hovels with black slaves.
“Free emigrants we do welcome. Brazil occupies half the South American continent. We can offer a home to many millions from Europe. Every year, one hundred thousand go to Argentina; the United States welcomes three hundred thousand. Brazil? We are fortunate to receive thirty thousand. What emigrant longing for a better life will take ship at Naples or Lisbon to sail to a gloomy prison where slavery flourishes amid agricultural fiefs?
“With all my heart and strength, I denounce slavery. I denounce it as a violation of every article of the penal code, of every commandment in the law of God!”
At Engenho Santo Tomás, the Casa Grande dominated the lan
dscape like a bulwark against change. Five generations of Cavalcantis had controlled the plantation from this grand old mansion built by Bartolomeu Rodrigues Cavalcanti in 1751. The present senhor de engenho, Rodrigo Alves Cavalcanti, a great-great-grandson of Bartolomeu, was progressive enough to have been one of the first Pernambucans to install steam turbines in his mill, but if he saw the slightest threat to his dominion, Rodrigo Cavalcanti would dig in his silver-spurred boots.
Late one January afternoon in 1885, on the deep veranda in front of the Casa Grande, Rodrigo was engaged in conversation with his brother, Fábio Alves, and his own son, Celso, who was nineteen.
Rodrigo was fifty-two, four years older than Fábio, the difference in age accentuated by their appearances. Rodrigo was of middle height, bronzed and athletic-looking, with a round face and alert green eyes; his dark brown hair was thinning, but more than compensated for by bristling side-whiskers, flowing mustache, and a heavy beard.
Dr. Fábio was the same height as his brother but much thinner. He had the same intelligent green eyes, but compassion shone in them. His small beard and modest mustache were in marked contrast to Rodrigo’s hirsute splendor. His clothes were the latest London fashion, but he was no dandy and he seemed slightly disheveled. There was an aura of impatience about him, a sense of urgency.
Fábio had been on the platform in the Teatro Santa Isabel that Sunday in November, as a member of Joaquim Nabuco’s election committee. A personal friend of Nabuco, who often visited Fábio’s home near the Passagem do Madalena — a bridge across the Rio Capibaribe in Boa Vista, a suburb of Recife — Fábio shared Nabuco’s belief that Brazil would not take its place among the community of free nations until the day slavery ended.
And, like Nabuco, with whom he had often discussed this subject, Fábio saw abolition as only the beginning of the struggle. To this day, he was haunted by the memory of the Paraguayan boys slaughtered at Acosta Ñu during the great war. And six years ago, here in northeast Brazil, Fábio for the second time in his life witnessed an immense human tragedy: For eight months he worked with other doctors at Fortaleza, Ceará, among the tens of thousands who had fled the drought in the interior. The refugee camps were a hecatomb; 15,390 souls were carried out to trenches during one month alone. The seca was a calamity of nature, but the improvidence, ignorance, filth, and abject poverty of the stricken people stampeding to the coast — Fábio saw this as the work of man.
Brazil Page 95